Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
lies behind the behaviour is important and that responsible tourist behaviour is best encouraged
through developing pro-environmental values as part of intrinsic motivation.
Common motivators for pro-environmental behaviour stressed by Defra (2008) and
covering both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation included the 'feel good' factor, individual
benefi ts such as health or fi nancial outlay, ease of behaviour, social norms and being 'part of
something bigger'. A sense of equity and fairness felt by individuals comparing themselves to
other members of society has been shown to be important (National Endowment for Science
Technology and Arts [NESTA] 2008; Sustainable Development Commission 2006). Individual
tourists are more likely to change their behaviours to more responsible choices if they believe
others to be doing the same, a spirit of collective behavioural change eventually embedding in
the social norm. Common barriers to behavioural change are also insightful, including external
constraints such as working patterns and demands on time, but also ingrained behavioural habit,
consumer scepticism and feelings of disempowerment (Defra 2008).
Marketing for responsible tourism
Having discussed the controversies of marketing at the macro-level, we focus here on marketing
at the micro-level, as a management discipline and as practised by marketing professionals within
tourism organizations. The strategic case for destinations to use marketing to spatially and
temporally spread and disperse tourists, their associated benefi ts, and to mitigate their negative
impacts, to increase length of stay as opposed to driving up trip numbers, to inform segmentation
decisions according to responsible behaviour patterns and to encourage domestic tourism is well
documented across both the tourism planning and tourism marketing literature. De-marketing
has also received attention as a strategic tool to relieve detrimental pressure on the environmental
capacity at honeypot or otherwise fragile destinations (e.g. Beeton 2003).
For tourism businesses, much of the attention has been on the 'greening' (or similar terminol-
ogy) of the tourism product offer across all stages of the product life cycle, often through engage-
ment with certifi cation schemes, CSR and different types of partnerships. For example, the
responsibility credentials of suppliers and supplier procurement policies as 'inputs' to the fi nished
product are important decisions at the front end of the product life cycle (e.g. Schwartz,
Tapper and Font 2008; Travelwatch 2006). At the opposite end of the product lifecycle, waste
management and disposal are also integrated into the systems designed to engineer more respon-
sible tourism products (e.g. Dileep 2007). There is now considerable expertise and specialism
afforded to the different environmental components that could be said to contribute to 'green-
ing' the tourism product offer (e.g. the three Rs, energy effi ciency, fresh water management,
waste disposal, research and development into technological solutions such as biofuels etc.) so
that they are rarely identifi ed in the literature as directly of marketing concern. Nonetheless the
fact is that taken together they build the sustainability agenda for marketing.
Some effort has been made by tourism marketing academics to organize responsible activities
in other ways. Pomering, Noble and Johnson (2011) cross-referenced an expanded marketing
mix that absorbed the work of services marketers Booms and Bitner (participants, process and
physical evidence) and tourism marketer Morrison (partnership, packaging and programming)
against the Triple Bottom Line of sustainable development (environmental, economic and social).
Hudson and Miller (2005) in their examination of responsible tourism marketing referred to
tourism businesses as inactive, reactive, exploitative (associated with greenwashing practices) or
proactive according to their distribution along the two dimensions of environmentally responsible
action (waste management, fuel management, community relations etc.) and environmental
communications (brochures, websites, press releases and - in today's currency - social media).
